Friday, November 8, 2013

✦ Bees are essential to the fascinating work of award-winning Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck, who uses apiary feeding boards and hive "blankets" to create her sculptures and drawings. Dyck, who calls the bees her "collaborators", is showing in the exhibit "Nature's Toolbox: Biodiversity, Art and Invention", on view through December 15 at Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University. A range of interesting articles about Dyck's work is listed on her Website.

✦ My first introduction to Spanish visual artist Sergio Albiac came by way of a science feature in The Washington Post. Albiac writes computer programs that generate images he then might use in creating his paintings; he calls it "my generative sketching process". One of his current projects, the subject of the Post brief, is Stardust, which creates collages that take as their source Hubble Space Telescope images and personal photographs. Albiac welcomes the public's participation (see directions at the project link). The portraits can be quite beautiful (images here and here). Visit his Website to see the range of his art-science projects and their results.

Three of Albiac's generative video portraits, Content is Queen (see below), Living Icon, and Michelle, were shown at Artisphere, Arlington, Virginia, September 12 - October 20.

Here's a video (there is no sound) showing Albiac's generative painting Content is Queen, in which both whole image and partial content are shown simultaneously.

✦ Though she has a day job as a senior scientist at the Medical School of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Simcha Even-Chen is an award-winning clay artist with an international reputation. She recently exhibited her eye-catching work in the Cluj International Ceramic Biennale (CICB 2013) in Romania and participated in a workshop at the 10th Biennial Ceramics Seminar in Villa Gessell, Argentina. Her slab-built pieces displaying her signature grid design are fluid yet controlled, elegantly twisting and turning, always perfectly balanced.

✦ The cover for a collection of poetry (Dan Gerber's Sailing through Cassiopeia) sent me to the Website of painter Graceann Warn of Ann Arbor, Michigan. A full-time studio artist who exhibits internationally, Warn incorporates found objects into her oil and encaustic assemblages. Beautiful work! Warn is showing solo in "Finding True" through the end of the month at River Gallery, Chelsea, Michigan.

✦ Have you heard about the iPad application Planetary? Acquired by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the interactive data visualization app was the subject of an article in September in Smithsonian Magazine. (It's received tremendous press.) You may download your own copy from iTunes (it's free). It's a beautiful application that I can foresee having innumerable applications (e.g., poetry) beyond the museum's own.

✭ The solo exhibition "Diana Al-Hadid", showcasing large gypsum and metal sculptures, small bronzes, and drawings by Syria-born Diana Al-Hadid, is on view through January 5, 2014, at SCAD Museum of Art at Savannah College of Art and Design. A catalogue accompanies the show, which appeared earlier this year at Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. (You'll find a series of images here.)

✭ "History in the Making: 100 Years After the Armory Show" continues at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Drawn from the museum's permanent collection, the exhibition, on view through December 1, marks the centennial of the first modern art show. Included are paintings, drawings, and sculpture by American and European artists, including Paul Cezanne, Honore Daumier, Goya, and Henri Matisse, who were represented in the 1913 show. Listen to an exhibition playlist or download and read the audio transcript.

1913 Armory Show (See poster to left. Click to enlarge. Source: 1913 Armory Show Website created in 2001 by Shelley Stapes for American Studies Program at University of Virginia.)

✭ Misrepresentations in 15th and 16th Century European society of indigeneous peoples in artistic depictions of North America are the subject of "Jacob Meders: Divided Lines", a panoramic installation at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Meders's woodcuts, on view through December 31, address the assimilation of indigenous identities and "challeng[e] the perceived superiority" of European society.

✭ At Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, you'll find "The Power of Photography", which celebrates the 125th anniversary of National Geographic. On view through April 27, 2014, the exhibition is both on the wall and virtual. In addition to "mosaics of more than 400 images" spanning the period 1888 to the present and a digital installation of more than 500 images, the show presents six video "walls" presenting individual photographs and photographic essays, making viewing unique with each visit. Also featured is an original documentary commissioned by ASP to profile and honor six photographers whose work appears in the October 2013 issue of the magazine.

✭ Ceramist Adam Silverman's first museum exhibition continues at Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, California. "Clay and Space", on view through January 19, 2014, comprises a series of installations in four galleries. In the first are 15 plexiglass boxes containing recent work; in the second, Silverman's pieces are displayed in "burnt wood shelves" integrated in the brick walls of two "rooms"; large ceramic sculptures occupy the third gallery; two video projections of Silverman's pots are seen in the fourth. Coinciding with the exhibition is the release of a book about Silverman, Adam Silverman Ceramics (Rizzoli Press, September 2013) by Skira Rizzoli.